Iter 7 feels a bit sparse, my intention for it was to showcase the trading ship changes, but since I disabled “colonizing” other bases trading ships don’t have anybody to trade with. I already put in the code to capture bases into iter 8.

The process goes like this: player builds a ship, ship uses 50 crew. Ship docks at either neutral or enemy asteroid base. If neutral player takes control of asteroid base. If enemy base, the crew of the ship of 50 attack the base’s crew. At first the attackers would lose a static number of 5 “troops” per round, this felt very odd, so I made this a random number between 2 and 5. The defenders lose a base number of 5 crew each round, and then an additional 0 to 10 crew, giving it a bit of a randomized feel, but also making it in favor of the attackers.

Another aspect that I’m working is some common RTS elements, in past iterations I had a “enemy” object that just spawned shisp based on a timer, after a spawn the “budget” of ships would increase up to a maximum value. These ships would pop in instantly, and wouldn’t be linked to any asteroid base, wouldn’t take up any resouces of crew. Because I wanted this to be linked to asteroid bases (to make the enemy less of a cheater, more obeying the laws of the game that the player has to obey), I changed it so that asteroid bases queue up ships to be built, then once a pre-determined number of ships are built the base checks whether there are enemies nearby, if not then it orders the built ships to attack the player’s base.

Next up: having bases build stations, defensive, shipyards, etc.

So my goal is to make the game – more game like giving the player their first objective, conquer enemy asteroid bases. Will work on adding “research” in to the game as well, this is to essencially limit the ships avaiable to the player, thus allowing me to be able to control the early game. If I know that the player can only build corvette class ships then I know what I can send against the player. Also this will give the player another goal: get better tech to build bigger ships